The use of graphical displays to convey information is an important part of the activities in most businesses and corporations such as those in the mass communication industry. Two such industries, which rely heavily on graphical images, are the journalism industry and the advertising industry. In business, executives make presentations to directors, managers conduct meetings with staff, salespersons make presentations to potential customers, doctors conduct meetings with nurses, lawyers make presentations to juries, and so on. A great many professionals conduct and attend meetings and presentations regularly. Much effort therefore goes into creating and delivering effective presentations and preparing for and conducting effective meetings. In addition to the business world, many individuals use graphical images in communications. Much of the conveying of graphical images occurs through the use of computers and computing networks.
These displays contain information related to the nature of the particular display. The pieces of information can be referred to as objects and can include text, charts, graphs and pictorial images. Each display contains one or more of these objects. Each display contains information about the objects contained on the display. This information includes information about any hotspot (hyperlink) objects contained on the display. This information is created by software during the creation of the display and is stored such that the information is transparent to the user.
In a computing environment, there are many graphical displays that appear on a user's machine. There are countless types of displays in any computing environment and include typical displays such as web pages and presentation slides. The challenge of enabling users to search through these displays to find the particular information that they desire increases as the amount of information available increases. No matter whether the information resides on a user's local computer or if the user is accessing the information via a computing network, the same need arises regarding improved tools to help navigate in large amounts of information. A good example of large amounts of information brought together and made available to everyone is the World Wide Web.
The World Wide Web, also referred to as the Internet, is a global computing environment in which all information (text, images, audio, video, computational services) that is accessible from the Internet can be accessed in a consistent and simple way by using a standard set of naming and access conventions. Internet users can access computing sites all over the world. A user can connect from his/her machine to thousands of Web servers simply by “clicking” on an image or by entering a specific address. Users can connect to many different types of systems and not be aware of the system differences. Users can also access many different types of information such as text, images, audio, video and computational services. The user can perform all of these tasks using a single web-browser that can access this information. The ability to access information via the Internet is the result of hyperlinks that connect this seemingly infinite body of information together. A hyperlink is text or an image in a web site that can be accessed in order to have some action performed. During this process of accessing a hyperlink, the user typically moves a pointing device such as a mouse over certain areas referred to as hotspots, and then clicks the mouse to signal the initialization of the desired action.
When a user is performing this exercise on the internet, the user may often find him or herself in a situation where they feel lost in the midst of a hierarchy of web pages. After clicking multiple times on a number of hotspots with hyperlinks the user may end up at some location that is unknown to the user. In addition, the user may not know how to get back to the original starting point. Many users may identity this experience. Along the way when repeatedly clicking hotspots on the screen, the user will pass through pages where the graphical look and feel and colors of the display remain constant. The look, feel and colors all comprise the ‘image’ for one website. Then the user will click on and get pages with a different look, indicating that they have gotten into another website. The transfer from on site to another site is transparent to the user, and sometimes not desired. Under all circumstances the tour taken is following a path of some nature of randomness, and certainly without any visibility of a hierarchy. The experience and feeling of getting lost is very likely to happen any time a person spends 5 minutes on the internet.
A Web Browser usually provides a user with the ability to use a ‘Back’ button that takes the user back to the previous screen. However, it is possible for some web applications or web pages to disable that ‘Back’ button. Furthermore, the back button may be the only means a user has to prevent getting lost during the search for information.
The WWW is heavily based on using the ‘Back’ button in the navigation process. The use of the ‘Back’-button is more a consequence of ‘ease of information development’ rather than is it desired from an end user ‘navigational ease of use’ point of view. In navigation the user should always go forward, never go back. Going back is non productive and waste of time. However, many users have gotten accustom going back and therefore they may not imagine anything else.
To really design for navigation takes a lot more than basic text editing. With basic text editing you are able to produce a ‘web’ of pages that link to one another. The original WWW in the very early days grew out of basic text editing. The need also arose to create navigational menus, which could also be done in smaller systems by basic text editing. The need for these navigational menus contributed to the introduction of frames in Web Browsers. Frames allow a menu residing in a frame to stay visible on the screen after the user selects an item on the menu that will cause some new informational document appear in another frame in the same window. However the direction of internet technology has moved slightly away from frames as it is not possible for a user to bookmark specific information found in a frame and have the context of the other frames book marked simultaneously. Most recent implementations of web applications tend to work without frames but still implement the menu kind of functionality provided by frames. The result appears, to the user, as if the document has inside knowledge about the hierarchical structure above the document. Some applications are even so clever that they can distinguish which navigation path the user took to get down to the document. This procedure is useful in cases where one particular document may reside multiple places in a menu hierarchy. This is very different from navigation in a file system on a computer disk where the documents are physical, while in menu hierarchies menu items are only imaginary documents implemented as pointers to physical documents.
The described principle of avoiding use of frames has the non-appealing and to the user maybe surprising effect that the entire window is refreshed including the menu when the user selects a menu item. Another disadvantage of this method is that it takes extra time to refresh the entire screen including the menus on the screen.
In the described way the ‘web’ of pages and documents, on the internet have become more and more structured over the years. Tools became available to create menus in hierarchies and a lot of other things making the non technical web editor able to take advantage of animation and more and more other facilities provided by web browsers, the web browsers themselves also becoming more and more advanced. Lotus Notes and Domino from Lotus Development Corporation are examples of tools that provide structure, in terms of menus and views, both for use with web technology and for use as applications running on a local computer.
Slide presentations are one area where it is desirable to navigate through a large volume of slides another to select slide for a presentation. However traditional slide presentations tend to be individual files with poor integration between multiple presentations. For example there is not much possibility to navigate in traditional slide presentations, like a hotspot on one slide in one presentation can take the user to another slide in another presentation. Traditional slide presentations tend to be prepared for a sequential walk through from the first slide to the last slide.
Even with the developments in this technology, there remains a need for a method and system that can enable a user to navigate in a well organized hierarchical graphical display repository looking for information for various purposes, but maintain the visibility of the overall hierarchical structure at any given instant.